Category: Meetings

State of the Gaming UnionSpeaker: Nick Skarott
Basic (and free) games such as the beloved Tuxracer used to be the staples of gaming in Linux. In 2013 the game development company Valve changed the landscape bringing their digital games distribution platform STEAM to Linux, and with it a buzz word – SteamPlay – highlighting cross platform games that work on Linux from small independent studio titles, to huge AAA titles from the likes of Square Enix, and beyond. Recent developments have changed things for the better in Linux, and Nick has been looking at them in great detail. Could 2019 truly be the year of the Linux Desktop from a gamers point of view?

Text Editor MiscellanySpeakers: Tom Ryder, Giovanni MorettiTom Ryder and Giovanni Moretti will show a few tricks with the venerable text editors Vim (Vi IMproved) and GNU Emacs, respectively. If you don’t already use one of these editors, and you’re curious to try one, this might be useful to you. (These presentations may be somewhat off-the-cuff!)

The Chronicles of GNU LinuxSpeaker: Tom Ryder
Tom will give us the story of how we got Linux from Unix and it’s unlikely marriage to GNU libraries and user space tools. He will cover the tension between Linus Torvald’s pragmatism and Richard Stallman’s idealism and Linux’s expansion in the 90’s.

The Fediverse Alternative: Distributed and Federated Social Networks
Speaker: Giovanni Moretti
Google has decided to shut down Google+ leaving its two million+ users looking for another home. This decision illustrates how vulnerable users of centralised social media sites such as Facebook, Instagram, Tumblr and Twitter are to arbitrary changes by those running the site. Giovanni will discuss alternative distributed social networking options such as the Fediverse and the IndieWeb that free users from centralised control.

We’re ordering pizza for the last meeting of the year. We haven’t decided from where, but we have faith that the democratic process can be applied. The committee has agreed to subsidising pizzas by $5 per person (cap of $100).

Retro gaming will be provided by Nick Skarott through Raspberry Pi and an old CRT screen. We’ll end the year by protecting the Earth from aliens and solve the rest of the world’s problems through ?rational? conversation.

Unity 3d

William Bell will be doing a quick overview of some of the games which have been made with Unity and some of it’s benefits and drawbacks compared to one or two other popular game engines. He’ll also be going over a small scene to demonstrate how easy it is to make the basis of a simple game.

About: William works as a web designer for ProDev and develops games as a hobby.

Supercharging STEAM (and other related services)

Nick Skarott came across an issue with his local LAN party’s network. With almost all video games being distributed and patched via online services like Steam, Origin, Battle.Net and UPlay, an early patch on LAN day can cripple the connection to the outside world, ruining the experience for many at these parties. He will share his container based solution with us.

About: Nick is interested in all things multimedia and organises broadcasting of sporting events such as the recent Badminton World Federation Super 300 tournament in Auckland.

Making a Sieve in Blender

John Flower will demonstrate how to use the Thickness Modifier in Blender to create sieves and collanders.

Journey into Linux and Open Source
Don Esslemont was first exposed to computing in the Royal Navy as a gunnery officer and made use of them after in his career teaching Economics and Finance at various tertiary institutions. He will share his journey starting from setting up a Unix server at Massey in the late 70s.

Kodi – The Debunk of the Legalities, The “OSCA” ROM, and the hidden niceties.
Still evolving the ultimate media setup, Nick Skarott will run through Kodi itself and talk about the current stigma in media, installation on hardware costing less than $80 using a project called CoreELEC, and some hidden neat tricks that have been found to enhance the media experience and further the evolution of his home media setup.

About: Nick is passionate about all things multimedia and is involved in broadcasting events such as the recent Badminton World Federation Super 300 tournament in Auckland.

Email with Mutt
Tom Ryder will review this venerable email tool that runs in a terminal, for reading and writing messages in plain text in your choice of text editor.

About: Tom is a systems administrator for Inspire Net, and a terminal tools enthusiast.

Richard Barlow will speak on Nextcloud. It is an alternative open source solution to replace proprietary cloud services. It allows users to host their own server with full control. With the ability to store and share files across the web.

Short talks will be given by Joseph Calkin on AWS and John Flower on Exporting Terrain Contours from Blender Using Freestyle.

Bob Bailey will be introducing us to Node.js. What it is useful for and when not to use it, and will illustrate this with some real world examples. After a short demo he will also highlight some surprising places that it crops up.. This will be followed by short talks on Darktable, f.lux vs Redshift , and Drupal 8.

Joseph Calkin will introduce Docker. It is an open platform for developers and sysadmins to build, ship, and run distributed applications. This will be followed by short talks on Acorn Archimedes Emulation, DBeaver, LD-Log, and Motion Tracking in Blender.